Backlinks Explained

What is a backlink?
Any url for a site posted anywhere on the internet is a backlink for that site. If rawr.com puts a link to poof.com on their site, poof.com just got another backlink. But the details are quite a bit more complicated than just that.

Backlinks aren’t everything. But they are said to be the majority deciding factor in your search engine placement. Sites with a lot of backlinks are seen by Google as more important than sites with less backlinks. Some people spend hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars trying to get their links on other popular sites, link campaigns, link exchanges. But is it really worth it? Apparently so, because your search engine traffic can increase exponentially from strong and relevant backlinks.

All backlinks are not created equal. Backlinks on a less popular site count for less. Backlinks on a site whose keywords have nothing to do with yours, or is otherwise not similar in anyway to yours, count for much less. But backlinks that are either on a popular site, or a site similar to yours in content, is very powerful. If you put both together, its even more powerful. The Google spider is smart, it can tell 99.9% of the time if a site is similar to another, or not, by just looking at its content, so you really should focus on building relevant backlinks, or so it is widely believed. Google is very secretive about the actual formulas surrounding many aspects of their search engine, so although it is widely believed, its almost certain some facts are wrong or missing. Nontheless, it seems those who heed them succeed more than those who don’t.

If you don’t already know about Pagerank, you should read up on it elsewhere, or at my blog. Essentially pagerank is a rank that Google gives sites based on their own criteria, mostly popularity. Pagerank, abbreviated PR, runs from 1 to 10. 1 holds the least value, 10 holds the most. Google is PR 10, a newly started blog is actually rank 0. A backlink on a site with a higher pagerank counts for more than on those of lesser pageranks. A backlink on a site with similar content counts for more than on those of dissimilar content. There is more to it than that but this is just a basic guide. Now you know what backlinks are, and why they are so important. Your welcome! And good luck!

Internet Marketing
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